Here's a great example of passion and projects overcoming inertia...

Excerpt from: http://theenergyproject.com/blog/2009/12/high-school-way-it-ought-be

" HIGH SCHOOL THE WAY IT OUGHT TO BE

By Tony Schwartz, CEO, The Energy Project on Dec 01, 2009

How much more focused and engaged would high school students be if they were given an opportunity to pursue their passions – topics that truly sparked their interest and excitement?  

A year ago, we helped launch an experiment with 9^th graders at the Riverdale Country School, a small independent school in the Bronx.  A year earlier, a new head of school had been hired and he brought to his role a series of ideas about education that ought to be commonplace but are all too rare. Among them: 

The next expression of disruptive innovation... freely available from Google and aptly named. It's early in the develoment cycle, but what a fantastic tool for learning. Source - eSchool News

In February 2008, Teaching Matters began a pilot project to give the XO laptop to one class of sixth-grade students at Kappa IV, a middle school in Harlem. There are three sixth-grade classes at Kappa IV, and the students in each class stay together for all their classes. The laptops were given first to one class first, chosen by lottery, and then to the other two classes at the end of the semester. The XO was to be used specifically for the final three units of a year-long Teaching Matters literacy curriculum, which was taught to all sixth graders, but the students were allowed to use them in other classes if their teachers allowed this. After the first two weeks, they were also allowed to take them home. Before they did so, however, the school held a meeting for parents, both to orient them to the XO as a computer and to respond to their concerns.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people.

"We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says.

The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: "If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now." Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children.

More information at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66